USA > Massachusetts > Plymouth County > Marion > Lands of Sippican on Buzzards Bay > Part 8
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In those days Heaven and Hell were real places and it was the height of respectability to go to meeting.
More houses were built in Sippican. Money was flowing . in from the sea. The salt makers, the captains of the sloops, the builders of the brigs and schooners spent their earnings in homes, large and small.
Much money came from salt works. Ever since the Rev- olutionary War when it paid so well to pump the sea water up over the marshes, everybody in the village had tried salt making.
For years men, women and children cut and piled the oak and maple logs and pine knots under the big iron pots which must be kept boiling furiously all day long, for it took 300 gallons of water to make a bushel of salt.
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A bushel was worth $8.00 in 1783. Cart loads went out of the village and the little coasting schooners took it as far as the Hudson river.
But the great forest trees were disappearing, and so they tried evaporation by the sun's rays.
Up from the harbor came the salt water pumped by wind mills through hollowed logs to vats about fifteen feet square; and on from vat to vat, the liquid ran until there was nothing left but salt which was packed in a salt house ready to sell.
Wooden roofs swung on cranes over the salt vats at night or when it rained. The works spread all over the lower village and for acres and acres nearly to where the railroad station is now.
Some years 20,000 bushels went out of the town. In 1806 "more salt was manufactured in Rochester than any other town in the commonwealth and it is the most productive of any business here practiced."
One fall one enterprising salt maker drove his team peddling salt all the way to Vermont, swapped his team for a better one and came home with a load of butter. This was "Capt. George Bonum" of. course.
One of the later salt makers was John Clapp whose plant extended from where the Congregational Chapel is now over the fields that afterwards were made into the Cottage St. homes and gardens, with one saving Captain building his house (now the "Rosamond Inn") of the lumber from the salt works, dis- mantled about 1840.
Down to the Ebenezer Holmes farm house, (now the Knowl- ton house), past the Nye salt works of which there were traces on the shore opposite Little Island in 1930, wound a deep rutted cart road with gates to keep in the cattle.
All over the village the great wind mills turned. It lasted half a century.
In 1825 George Bonum Nye writes in his "Acount Book" that in October John Clapp was debtor to him "To Drawing one thousand Bushels of Salt, $8.38, and again in October, 1826 "to drawing one thousand bushels of salt, $8.60.
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That old "Acount book" of a century ago gives so many pictures of the life of Sippican.
Back in 1801 Nye is buying "cloath for a grate coat & trimming and making for four dollars."
In 1805 he is paying Jonathan Nye $89.00 for four cattle "Drove in 1804 and for the Prophets on the beefe Drove at the same time & four steers had of him in June, 1805."
And Silas Brigg, Stephen Barden, Nathan Clark, James Clark, Jonathan Dexter, Charles Blankinship, Stephen Ham- mond, Silas Handy, Nathan Jenne, Abner Mendell, John Lin- coln, Stephen Luce, Samuel Luce, Theopilis Pitcher and Elisha Wing are buying beef of him.
In 1806 Hadley's store (the Harwood house) and Luce's store (where the Browne house is now) appear on the long pages, and Reuben Allen is plowing Ram Island for $4.25.
In May 1809 he charges $6.67 for "two days plowing new ground with six oxen."
"Hey" comes up from "Charles Neck Meders" and he goes to "Hiller's Mil" and 'draws a Load for 50c", and Caleb Handy has to pay "to my going to Mattapoisett after your things $1.00, to my horse to carry your wife home and then to Mattapoisett 50c."
These were stage coach days. Thomas Jefferson was President, and a figure called Napoleon was on the far horizon.
The hard seated stages jolted over the deep rutted roads, sometimes all night long. Dr. Robbin, who preached in the Mattapoisett meeting house so long, complains in his diary of his experiences. "Was called at three o'clock" he writes, "A cold chilly night and an uncomfortable stage". He rode on one journey a hundred and sixty miles from ten o'clock at night until after day break the next morning. "The roads not good. Suffered considerable with cold".
By 1812 Sippican had a new tavern, the present Wom- an's Clubhouse, built by Capt. Caleb Handy. It was nearer the meeting house. A long rambling building with summer kitchen, wood shed, and wagon sheds, barn and hen houses strung out as any farm house of the time.
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An old lady living in the middle of the century described the sailors swarming up to the Tavern for "flip" and "grog", that she mixed for them at the bar.
George Rivers in "The Count's Snuff Box" describes the tap room.
"Over the blazing oak logs in the broad open fireplace hung an iron kettle whose nose threw forth a volume of white steam. The room was dimly lighted with candles and an invigorating odor of sweetened rum made it clear to what pur- pose the boiling kettle hanging from the crane had been re- cently put."
"Flip" the favorite tavern drink of the fathers and grand- fathers was made in an earthern pitcher two thirds full of beer and, sweetened with molasses, with sometimes eggs and cream added, flavored by a gill of New England rum, then stirred with a red hot loggerhead of iron that had been kept in the live coals of the fire place.
The foam and the bitter burnt taste! Great flip glasses are still found in Old Sippican "cupboards."
The sweet spicy odors of the Tavern store room with its barrels of hard cider, New England rum, jars of spices and loaf sugar!
And the stage coach as it swung down from the Old Landing; at first the jolting cart with side seats, but in five or six years a real Concord coach with body suspended on great leather straps was driving up with passengers alighting on the high stone steps of Handy's Tavern. Four horses to whirl it along the sandy or muddy roads; the drivers with their bear skin caps in winter, fur coats and leggings; the reins held just so, with the long whip measuring twelve feet to the tip of the lash.
Out come the travellers numb with cold in winter; dusty and tired in summer; with carpet bags and band boxes and little hide covered trunks studded with brass nails, some of them to this day reposing under the eaves of old attics in Sippican.
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Along the trails where the Indians ran so many miles the red and yellow stage coaches rumbled through the villages of Rochester.
The villages were growing. There was much trading in the little stores at the head of the Wharf.
They bought India goods, snuff sometimes kept in blown up pig's bladders, coffee, ginger, "furr hatts", cotton gloves, the very important pen knives to make their quill pens, "bord nailes", flint, rum, tobacco, shoe knives, brimstone, oxwhips and cassimere. A "hatt" might cost up to four dollars, "a pair of pantaloons, $2.66", "a pair of shose $1.75", and a "Waggon Boddy, $3.50."
The sandy road rambled up from the wharf with little houses close together, as far as the "Salt Box", now the St. Gabriel's Rectory. This was the last house in the village, built out of the village in 1802 by Capt. Stephen Hammond who sold his house in the Old Landing and built away from everybody to get rid of the noise of "unruly boys."
At the "Salt Box" the road turned and crossed over what is now the Ryder property to the present South street and so West to the old Mattapoisett Road, now a lane by the Univer- salist Parsonage. It crossed what is now the State Road and went on to Mattapoisett village over the Indian trail, now a woods road opposite the Evergreen Cemetery that ends in cran- berry bogs in the woods.
There began to be much talk about roads and school- houses. According to the town records the road from Silas Handy's to the wharf had been improved in 1801, also the road from the Landing to Sippican Lower Village.
So they mend roads and a bridge over Muddy Brook (the present Rochester and Marion Boundary), and "hey", and go to "the mil", and make salt, but the business that was growing along the harbor was the building of little brigs and schooners.
The wind mills might whirr over the marshes and fields, but the ship hammer was soon to drown them out.
From sunrise to sunset the little ships grew under the farmer's and saltworker's hands and when the West was a blaze
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of glory, along the Rochester roads the men trudged, carrying home for kindling the chips they had made.
Ship building had been going on for nearly two centuries in Buzzards Bay. The forefathers built, it is said, on these shores a trader with the Dutch, and year after year little ships had slipped down the inlets and coves of the Bay from the time when they were built in the woods and dragged down to low water by four yoke of oxen, to the days of real ship yards.
Most of the ships built in Sippican were for the coasting trade. They were from 75 to 175 tons and carried salt to Savannah and other Southern ports and brought back cotton and rice to New York or loaded lumber at the Landing for Nantucket and Newport.
"Good merchantable cedar shingles not to exceed 225 per M could be bought at the Landing" in 1777.
As in all the little seaport towns the ships were built on the co-operative plan; some gave timber, some rigging, sails, iron, some money. The work was done at first in the winter- time and until 1800 they were built without plans, and some queer looking craft were set afloat.
It is impossible to know the number and names of the little craft that were built along the shore from the Landing down to Charles Neck.
Wing Hadley and Butler Wing were the great ship build- ers of the Rochester district up to the close of 1700. Then everybody who made a little money in hides, tallow, salt or farming started to help build ships.
A sloop called "Planter" or "Southern Planter" was built and run from Rochester before 1775. It is said that the Sloop "Defiance" made a voyage in 1771 but Rochester Towne was not a port. There was no New Bedford, so the Rochester ships had to clear from Nantucket or Newport.
In 1774 Sloop "Rochester" cleared from Nantucket. There were many little ships lost as there were no lighthouses, and the French and Spanish took many.
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The old ship builders and the old ships are grey ghosts that haunt the shores of the Old Landing and Sippican, most of them lost in the mist of the years.
From a list made in 1912 by the 80 year old town clerk, Charles Henry Delano, a few names appear. The old man remembered that before 1860 there were built and launch- ed by William Clark, who lived in the present Gilder Lodge, at the Island Ship Yard, now the town park, the following ships-the Brig "Herald", the ship "John Denham" and the schooners, "Angel", "C. J. Jones", "J. Vail", "Hopeton", "Home" & "Roswell King."
On the Admiral Harwood Lot, Edward Sherman built the Schooners "Ocean Queen" the "John Frazier", and the "Edward Franklin."
In the Old Landing Village on the "Old Ship Yard" above Mr. Emmon's house, John Delano built the "Broadfield", the "Richard M. Demill", the "Abby and Elizabeth", and the "Oliver Cromwell."
He had heard that north of the Old Landing wharf a sloop called the "Georgia" and a schooner, the "Cotton Planter" had been built.
In the old sheep skin book we read of a sloop of 1805.
"Sept. 23, 1805 then Silas Briggs and George B. Nye Reckoned and settled all Book Acounts Except the two Last Settlements of the Sloope Salley Run and maid an Even Bal- lance as witnes our Hands."
And in June 1806 he writes
"Stephen Luce, Dr.
to drawing 267 feet of pine timber for the Sloop Earl- $6.47.
to drawing 55 ft. of Oak timber-$2.06
and in July 1807 a long page of items appears concerning the Sloop "Reformation". Among them
"to my going to Bedford after Deck nails and for iron and Mast Hoops and Painters" and "my going to Mattapoisett after Regin-$1.00". "Eleven Hundred of char Bords" and "45 ft. of Plank for the "bulkhead" and "one thousan of Bord Nales $1.83." He pays Stephen Barden
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"Bil for work-$45.74" and "to the Srouds Bought of the owners at the wharfe 2:2:8 att $15 Pr. Hunks-$38.70.
"Caleb Jonathan Handy, Bil for Cabin Worke-$40.33 to cash paid Theophilis Pitcher for 60 yardes of Duck 20 cents-$12.00."
At the end of the long page it totals up $496.43
that the Sloop "Reformation" owed him in July 1807.
And in December 1807 Silas Briggs is Dr.
"to one Load of Bords-$8
to an order I gave Seth Haskel on Little James-$5.00
to paying Jonathan Hiller for 165 feet of Plank-$3.30" and again the "Reformation"
"to William Parlow for worke on Sloop Reformation to oake timber 171 feet-$13.24
White Pine Plank-1257
$36.45
to one Bow Sprit
3.00
to Gaft and Quarter rails 1.50
ยท to paying William Nye for a mast 10.00
The ghost ships of old Sippican slipping off the ways, with a great noise of hammers and planks, into the shining water of the harbor, where the Indian canoes had silently rocked!
They meant so much in the lives of the people of old Rochester Towne for it was by ships that they got to far places.
True they had horses and ox carts and sometimes went to New Bedford where in the year of the building of the "Reformation" George Bonum Nye drove to buy some of his "deck nailes", and where Sippican women could purchase "Lute strings for Gowns and Bonnets", "Parasols, morroco shoes, English and French silk gloves, loaf lump and clayed brown sugar."
New Bedford was a growing town and one could go to Boston without staying over night in Taunton. A new line was advertised in the New Bedford Mercury.
"The Old Colony Stage leaves Boston at sunrise Tues- days, Thursdays and Sat .- arrive at 3 P. M. N. B. from Brad- ley's (at the Old Province House.)"
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But it was on the barks and schooners that the "Sippican- ers" went to far places to make a living, so when in the same year that Handy's Tavern was built the smouldering trouble with the mother country broke out into war, it was very un- popular, because the little coasters and whalers must quickly sail to safe harbors.
And they had to leave their salt making and hides and shipyards to go up to the Center to talk about a committee of safety.
Capt. Roland Luce who lived where the Telephone Ex- change is now, and Timothy Hiller were chosen officers.
It was a real war for Old Rochester Towne with two small companies of men stationed on Charles Neck, because there must be a constant lookout for the British cruisers in Buzzards Bay.
Just as in the Revolutionary War supplies were being smuggled across the Cape. Such an unpopular war and "Buz- zards Bay a nest of smugglers." The "Nimrod" a British cruiser was on guard. It was said "a man bringing corn from the Elizabethan Islands to New Bedford to the mill was refused clearance for his bag of meal."
New Bedford said
"We have scrupulously abstained from all intent and concern in sending out private armed vessels and resolved to quarantine for 40 days any American privateers that polluted the harbor," but it was such an exciting game to elude the cruisers that ships slipped out and in.
One New Bedford man watched the most exciting race of a lifetime from the tall tower of the old Unitarian Church. In one day he saw four whalers dodging trying to make their home port and they did it & came safely to harbor at home wharves. In 1814 the Nimrod bombarded Wood's Hole from noon to night because the Falmouth people wouldn't give up the Nantucket Packet thought to be breaking the law. Falmouth said "Come and get 'er!" and then the guns boomed!
Thirty-four ships were burned in New Bedford harbor and the war got altogether too near when on Monday morning, June 13, 1814 the Nimrod appeared off Bird Island.
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The "Great Neckers" woke to find her anchored off the Island, and wash day was forgotten!
Everybody rushed to bury their valuables!
From an old account we learn that Jemima, the house- keeper of Stephen Delano, who lived on the East shore was so frightened that she dug a hole and buried all her fortune, about fifty cents, and never could find the spot afterwards. They watched in great excitement the six small boats with lateen sails set out around the point and make up towards Wareham Narrows.
Two hundred and twenty armed men were landed in Wareham. They burned twelve vessels and did other damage ... to the amount of $20,000.
From Great Hill the Sippican people watched the smoke pouring up.
The Nimrod got aground off Bird Island, and it is said cast off her upper deck of guns and there they are to this day, at least the scallop fishermen lose drags where they are sure there are no rocks.
Guns were placed on Great Hill but Sippican nestled be- hind its entrance islands unharmed. It is said that the Charles Neck sentries rowed out to the Nimrod and told how very small the village was compared with Wareham! And then the war was over and the ships put out to sea again, and life settled down to its everyday tasks.
Sometimes a terrible storm so impressed itself that the picture of it came down to the next generation. The great gale of 1815 was such a storm.
"Saturday, September 23, there was a shower of rain from the East, then the wind veered to S. E. and increased in vio- lence" we read in an old account "About 8 or 9 o'clock the tide became on a sudden (the time for the high tide was half past eleven) as high as the highest Spring tides and continued to increase its height with surprising velocity. At about 10 o'clock the tide water had covered all the English mowing lands. Wind veered from S. S. E. to S. and blew with amazing violence. Such wind never was known on this coast". The salt works all up and down the harbor were ruined and many
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of the houses carried off. The houses would hold their posit- ions until the tide reached the roof and then many of them were overturned and some floated across the harbor. Some of the ruins were found in the woods at Wareham. "A store at Great Neck containing India goods (West) was floated across to Wareham where it remained with its goods in perfect pre- servation."
"Coasting vessels in the bay were drawn high on the shore-one floated among the forest trees in an upright position and was later relaunched."
The tide rose eight feet above the common level and for many years until 1890 there were nail heads high up on some of the houses in the Upper Landing to show how far the tide came up in the "Great Gale."
"The spray resembled a driving snow storm. Grass was entirely killed. Leaves of trees appeared scorched, and several cedar swamps perished. Wells and watering places for cattle were filled with sea water. The saltness of the wells near the sea remained until November. After the snows of the winter the wells became fresh again suddenly. Some didn't recover for two years. In 1816 some of the overflowed fields were planted with oats and had a larger crop than ever before. Mosses flourished and wild grasses came in where cultivated grass had been."
In many people's opinion it is a century hurricane as the old people tell of the great hurricane of the 16th century; and the great terrible storm that sank the land, tore the ground apart, and made Buzzards Bay in the old legends of the Indians, was thought to be one of the century hurricanes.
That same year of 1815, perhaps because of the hurricane, the great sea serpent, the "Scoliophis Atlanticus, the Great Serpent of the North American Seas", was seen near Plymouth in August and two years later near Cape Ann.
"Between eighty and ninety feet in length and about the size of a half barrel" with "head as large as head of a horse." "Fifty distinct portions out of water at one time" and "moving at the rate of a mile in two or at least three minutes."
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He had a "tongue like a harpoon" and at any minute might appear in Buzzards Bay.
He haunted the sailor's dreams for many years and at least one whaler later put out from Nantucket with the serious intention of hunting sea serpents as well as whales.
That same year of 1815, there was a scandal in town. The behavior in the meeting house on the corner was so bad that we can read in the New Bedford Mercury of May 15, of what the "Tything men" at least, thought about the situation.
"The Tything men of Rochester give notice that they should enforce the law" and it was signed by the twelve. Among the names are the familiar ones of George Bonum Nye and John Clapp.
On Saturday evening Sept. 10, 1819 we can picture every able bodied person in the village crowding down to the shore as far as Nye's Wharf, opposite Ram Island, to watch, as the sun sank behind the trees, for the first glow from Bird Island down at the mouth of the harbor.
"Ah! there she is! Old Bird Island Light!"
And a pirate for a keeper! Yes, he came in a govern- ment vessel and his bride is a lovely lady from Boston. He prevailed upon her to elope with him. And the story grew!
As the light glowed from the harbor's mouth, it brought a little shiver of excitement!
Pirates were Black Beards who "chewed wine glasses" in their cabins, and "burned sulphur to make their ships like Hell", or like "Domingo" who "walked freely at noon day parading the street of Matanzas in defiance of the law, and nobody dared touch him."
The girls saw
"An island in the Spanish main beyond the setting sun" with dare devils who might be fascinating, but the sailors saw
"Full forty gallant vessels
I robbed of gold in store
And full four hundred souls of life
They weltered in their gore."
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For pirates were real people to old Sippican! It didn't help one's comfort of mind when a husband was off at sea to read in even the religious papers of the day of how
"when boarded, Capt. and crew sent below, so regular was the system, so well calculated to inspire terror and fill the breasts of all with the most dreadful apprehension that every man marching upon deck expected to meet inevitable death."
"True stories" of the old Sippican people to be read today in the yellowed papers.
"We were all in succession ordered upon the deck and made to run the gauntlett, fifteen or twenty most ferocious and barberous monsters disguised in the shape of human be- ings from the cabin to the windlass, being beaten most cruelly and unmercifully with swords and pistols until death would have been a welcome visitor. We were then ordered to sit on the windlass with our backs turned to them, there to be shot- they put the pistols to our heads and fired them-it is im- possible to describe our feelings when after the report of the pistol we found ourselves still alive."
They "broke a sword over the mates head, hung him up by the neck and then threw him into the cabin." Oh! Pirates were well known and feared by the ship's crews that sailed out of Buzzards Bay and imagine a pirate, even though reformed, as keeper of Bird Island Light.
And according to one writer there was a pirate's cave "near the end of the tongue of lands, which separate Sippican and Wareham Bays." He writes "There existed many years ago a huge mass of rocks behind which, a little inland was a cave, the entrance to which was not noticeable to those who passed along the shore. If any one had landed at the exact spot, he might have seen a narrow hole entering the crags but it is doubtful if it would have attracted his attention. In 1814 it is said it was fitted up with many relics of wrecked vessels and a pile of shells that rose high against one of its walls."
The "beautiful lady" ran away in a little boat to the Point but was persuaded to return. She died and her lonely grave was marked by the flashing signal for a century.
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For a hundred years Bird Island Light has glowed at the harbor entrance. Only once has it failed. In a terrible storm it flickered out, and anxious watchers sailing through the surf found that it went out as a signal for help for a dying child.
They found a crushed boat, a frantic father and mother and a dead child.
The light flared forth but that father never tended it again.
These early days saw busy times in the little villages. There were 14 saw mills buzzing; 3000 sheep nibbling in the fields of old Rochester Towne; business in the ship yards in- creasing.
At the town meeting at the Center, roads and bridges took up much attention. They also began to talk about schools and schoolhouses. The only school house in the Sippican district had been destroyed by fire. It took them a year to decide to build another and sell shares in it. Some of the buyers appear in the old "Acount Book."
The schoolhouse was about 9 x 33 ft. and 8 ft. high, and the cost was very extravagant, $250.00.
This year of 1819 there were so many more children in the village that another small schoolhouse was built, where the post office is now, for a private school, and Miss Elizabeth (called Betsy then) Sprague Pitcher, whose family was a prominent one in Sippican, became the school mistress at fourteen years of age.
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